Archive for December, 2008

Who Loves Forced Rankings in HR?

Author: Dave Crisp

10 Dec

I’ve been musing again about why it is so difficult to get managers to understand how HR should work or why they should care. As proven in some very successful organizations it literally multiplies financial and productivity results by more than 3 to 10 times. So what’s the problem?

Then I came on this blog post by Paul Herbert: I Love Forced Rankings. Since Jack Welch has recanted on this theory that the bottom 10% should be identified each year… and then fired… forced rankings have lost favor in most operations. But as this article shows, there are always two or more schools of thought about any given HR practice. Human resources isn’t a cut and dried series of principles that you simply apply. It has to be tailored to your culture and situations.

The problem arises when you recognize that managers and cultures aren’t fixed in stone. Let’s say a company follows Herbert’s advice and institutes forced ranking to help encourage judgments between good and unproductive employees. That information can then be used to reward the good and coach or redevelop the unproductive and that may be the original intent, but as surely as grass is green, some manager will take this the opposite way and punish the unproductive while simply taking the top performers for granted.

Either way, we want managers to reward and react to performance. Many don’t. They simply sail on with the status quo and duck managing performance at all. The hardest hurdle seems to be to get them in general to apply judgment case by case rather than use rule of thumb systems like "let’s use forced ranking" as if this alone would solve the problem. It isn’t the process, it’s the assumptions about it, good or bad, which so many apply without the least bit of understanding about what the impact will be on actual people.

Is it any wonder that senior management has trouble buying into any given HR policy when there are such widely varying interpretations and uses of them? If only the core keys were understood, I believe, that problem could be resolved. The fact it hasn’t been in several millennia suggests it isn’t as easy as I think it should be, though.

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Filed under: 2 Positive - Feelings, Communicating Effectively, Fix The Jerks, Leaders of the Future

Organization Transformation & Engagement of People?

Author: Dave Crisp

2 Dec

Verity International hosted a great presentation and panel last month on Organizational Transformation and Engagement: an Oxymoron? It’s a great question. Can you change organizations while at the same time maintaining or even enhancing engagement of people in their work as opposed to what happens in so many cases… turning people off?

The answer unequivocally is yes. While it may be obvious that you ought to be able to achieve this, it clearly isn’t obvious how, since the McKinsey & Company survey presented by their head of North America (partial data here, more more data here) confirmed once again the long known fact that most mergers and significant changes fail. Only a third of all transformations succeed well or extremely well and major change tends to be even worse on average.

If you had to leave early you’d be forgiven for thinking this is old news, though always useful to know if it’s changing. And it seems to be… slightly. The study was useful in distinguishing types of change, some being harder than others, and especially for identifying what it takes to succeed and pitfalls. It was very interesting to hear these backed up by real experiences of the panelists who represented major organizations: a bank, a telco and a large hospital.

What was most interesting was to see the use of ‘complexity science’ language to describe what’s needed. Positive Deviance describes the process of looking for an example that is unusually successful and then using that to discover what works and why to replicate it. It’s a scientific advance especially in human behavior matters that again should be totally obvious, but isn’t. It’s been used with amazing results in situations as diverse as ending plagues in Africa to avoiding antibiotic resistant infections in modern hospitals (health care has been particularly active using it, but it fits in any industry).

In general what turned up was that all these organizations are using the knowledge gained from research and data more and more when it comes to managing people – again obvious, but late in developing. Many senior leaders wouldn’t think of ignoring market research or financial facts, but blithely used to toss aside scientific discoveries in the HR/people management field because "they know how people behave." After all, don’t we all. We’re people; we’ve watched people manage well and poorly for years, so of course we all think we know. Yet the success rate of keeping people engaged shows otherwise. It was gratifying to hear from such senior people in major organizations that more weight is being given to actually learning from research. I will likely find more to say over time about this particular event, which made a lot of points concretely visible. Great work!

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Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, Business/Strategy, Human Resources (HR), Learning Organization, Science

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Archive for December, 2008

Who Loves Forced Rankings in HR?

Organization Transformation & Engagement of People?

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